Investigating Differences in Formative Critiquing between Instructors and Students in Graphic Design

Critique is an essential skill of professional designers to
communicate success and failure of a design with others. For graphic design
educators, including critique in their pedagogical approaches enables students
to improve both their design capability and critique skills. Adaptive Comparative
Judgment (ACJ) is an innovative approach of assessment where students and instructors
make comparisons between two designs and choose the better of the two. The
purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between instructors’
and students’ critiquing practices. The data was collected through think-aloud
protocol methods while both groups critiqued the same design projects.

The results indicate that it took students longer to finish
the same amount of critiques as those completed by instructors. Students spent
more time describing their personal feelings, evaluating each individual design,
and looking for the right phrases to precisely express their thoughts on a
design. Instructors, with more teaching experience, were able to complete the
critique more quickly and justify their critique decisions more succinctly with
efficient use of terminology and a reliance on their instincts.